Amrita Participates in Mozilla CTF Challenge

The Amrita team that participated in Mozilla’s Capture the Flag (CTF) Challenge, was one of the few Indian teams to compete.

The 24 hour online competition began on January 24th, 2012 and saw participation from 211 teams from all over the world.

The Amrita team placed 14th in the competition, solving 10 problems out of 22.

Arvind S. Raj and Seshagiri Prabhu, both final-year students of BTech (Computer Science and Engineering) were joined by Bithin A., final-year student of MSc (Computer Science) in the winning team.

The team also consisted of Amrita engineering graduates Hrishikesh Murali and Zubin Mithra.

The team began the 24 hour challenge at 1.30 pm IST at the Cybersecurity Lab on campus. The 22 challenges covered the areas of reverse engineering, cryptography, web application hacking, exploitation and other trivia.

The Amrita team solved the first problem in Binary Exploitation within 30 minutes. This problem remained unsolved by several of the competing teams till the challenge ended.

After solving several web based problems on that day, the team returned on the next day to solve 5 more problems. Each challenge overcome won the team one flag.

At the end, among the 211 teams that participated, 119 had captured at least one flag.

“We would like to see more Indian teams participating in international contests such as this one,” team members shared.

The same team also hosts Amrita CTF Contest, which does see wide participation from students in Indian colleges and universities. These contests help students become aware of programming concepts that can help deter would-be hackers.

“We placed in the top 15 in the Mozilla CTF Challenge; this is the result of our hard work and Amma’s blessings. We received a lot of support from Vipin Pavitran Sir,” team members remarked.

The team also expressed its gratitude to Dr. Krishnashree Achuthan and Mr. Prabakaran Poornachandran of Cybersecurity Amritapuri, for providing lab facilities to enable them to practice for and participate in CTF events.